Thanksgiving

This year we had our first truly American Thanksgiving. Shinji's lab bitch Nan (excuse me graduate student) invited us and the whole lab to his parents place. They live very romantically at foot of some mountains about 1.5h away from San Diego. A couple of chickens and three horses ad to the charm of the ensemble. We had to bring some desserts and we tried our best to make something new. I tried to make some apple cookies but somehow there must have been something wrong in the translation of the amounts from the German cookbook to the American system with cups and fluid ounces and what not. Anyway, the cookies turned out eatable. Shinji decided to make a creme brulee and he succeeded very well in the end. Unfortunately, it took several attempts at caramelizing the sugar without burning it. This is really not easy and takes a lot of patience which is difficult to come up with at 1 in the morning...

Anyway, we packed our desserts in the car and drove to our destination on Thursday morning after feeding parasites of course. We arrived just in time to help with some of the preparations and to start drinking white wine. Unfortunately we had to keep on drinking for quite a bit while we were waiting for more guests to arrive. Finally 28 people sat down for the eating part and it was truly delicious! There was turkey of course and sweet potatoes, various salads, gravy, veggies and did I mention the turkey? Great! We had so much food and wine that we had to take a nap before most of Nan's family left and his high-school friends arrived. Of course there was more drinking and eating and we went even so far (or low...) as to play drinking games. This one was called King's cup and you have to draw cards and every card has a different meaning and you have to do different things and naturally drink lots of beers... I was sticking to the American light beers which was really clever but Shinji had a couple of shots and more wine, so he had some little difficulties on the next day to get out of bed.